Wine 1.7.19 Starts Work On Direct2D Support

The latest bi-weekly Wine 1.7 release is now available that will ultimately lead up to the Wine 1.8 stable release.

Found within Wine 1.7.19 are the following prominent changes, but also worth noting is that there's 99 bug-fixes:

- New JSProxy DLL for automatic proxy configuration.
- More OLE Accessible Object support.
- Improvements to the XML writer.
- Fixes for various memory issues found by Valgrind.
- Initial headers for Direct2D support.
- Various bug fixes.

Seeing 99 bug-fixes within this release is quite impressive for its two-week development period and is more than usual for Wine development releases. The automatic proxy configuration to Wine 1.7.19 is also a win and they have started on Microsoft Direct2D support, but within this release is just the initial header files.

Direct2D is Microsoft's 2D and vector graphics API in modern versions of Windows. Direct2D offers for high quality, fast performance via GPU acceleration while having interoperability with the earlier GDI/GDI+ and DirectDraw APIs. It will be interesting to see Wine's Direct2D support formulate and how well it will map over in the Linux space and if they end up mapping it to use Cairo or another library, but for today it's just the headers without an actual implementation.

Sadly, there's no major progress to report on at this time for Direct3D 10/11 improvements within Wine or on the other recent topics about GPU video decoding and the Direct3D command stream patches.

More details on today's Wine 1.7.19 release can be found via the announcement at WineHQ.org.